This installment finds Unit K/Mobile One being stationed ever closer to the perilous European front, with its attendant danger and devastation. For example, during this episode, in two different postings, Mobile One narrowly avoided being shelled. In a third, the hospital was situated so close to a gas-shell dump that an attack would have required personnel to don their gas masks in just seconds to escape serious harm. Along the way, this innovative group devised methods for performing operations safely during the approaching colder weather; and for doing surgeries at night, while still maintaining the cover of darkness. They also reconfigured a set of train cars to function essentially as a rolling hospital, capable of rapidly transporting large numbers of recovering soldiers further from the front. And on November 12, 1918, as Mobile One began arriving at the final French station covered in this installment, its personnel learned that the WWI armistice had become effective the day before.

Is the American West a physical place or the concept of interacting with the wilderness and taming the land? Better represented by John Wayne winning the West and settling down living happily ever after, or the later Clint Eastwood version of the West as a place of drunkards and violence? Or perhaps it was as captured by Blazing Saddles and City Slickers as a wildly bigoted and backwards place that is nothing to fondly be looked back upon? And how does the Council Bluffs/Omaha Metro fit into all of this? In this episode Ardennes Stolp provides some thought-provoking reflections on how to interpret the American West.

This is episode Four of the Invisible Excellence podcast series. It takes the listener right into the operating tents of the Army’s first ever battlefield hospital that actually moved long the front lines with the action– Council Bluffs’ Unit K/Mobile #1. The group’s leader, surgeon and former Council Bluffs mayor Donald Macrae, Jr., set the tone in his notes: “The shelling was begun about midnight, and the whine and explosion of the projectiles continued until after daylight.” This episode focusses on the unit’s first camps in France, the challenges they aced, and the dogged persistence and courage they employed that redefined battlefield medicine. Guest is writer/researcher Brian Mainwaring.